cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9937365
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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What's funny is in my experience in the USA it's not that there are not busses but they take SOO much longer. I had a job that was 2.8 miles away. It took 7 or 8 minutes to drive there(depending on if you hit the one traffic light on red). Theres a bus stop outside the company. There's a bus stop on the corner of my complex. I looked up on the bus provider website how long it would take...9 hours each way.
Years ago I was living in a different state, a friend was throwing a new years party in his college house and invited me. His college was 3 hours away. I thought about just taking a bus since obviously we would be drinking. I checked the bus schedule... It would take 2.5 days with 4 change overs each way.
I ended up just crashing on his couch and drove home after I recovered from the hang over.
Its just not feasible to take buses here due to how long they take.
Yep. It's pretty depressing.
A few years ago, I was in Texas with family and we wanted to visit NASA. My husband was adamant in taking the bus because my family are notoriously slow to get ready; fair enough. The bus ride took him 3hrs, which included a 20min walk from the nearest bus stop to NASA. It took us 40min to drive.
Public transport is pretty hostile in the US.
Yeah, now imagine you work at nasa... You wouldn't take the bus to/from work everyday would you?
Exactly! It's nuts. It means that everyone at that facility drives to and from work. None take public transport... at one of the most prestigious engineering bodies in the world.
I worked at a company with about 1000 people at our location... I never saw anyone get off the bus to come to work(there was a bus stop infront of the building and on the side) and on good weather days maybe 3 or 4 bikes there... Everyone else drove.
And all this from a country founded on rail...
That sounds like bus routes are either very meandery or they aren't frequent.
Yeah I think it's politics... "look we have busses and no one uses them we are just wasting money on them".
You might want to ask whether they were in the South East USA or elsewhere... there's history.
He probably misread the schedules because I refuse to believe 2.8 miles takes 9 hours. That is some serious "meandering".
9 hours!
Frequency doesn't matter if the route is somewhat direct, unless you say a 9 hour trip includes 8.5 hours of waiting on the bus?
You could walk 2.8 miles in about an hour.
Where ? On the busy road ?
Forgive them, they're probably not American and don't realise how shockingly dangerous by design it is to walk anywhere in America.
Over in Europe, a distance of less than 3 miles will often be best ridden, and if not you'd walk it.
I suspect its, A->B 10 mins, wait at B for 9 hours, B->C 10 mins.
There's a bus stop just a few blocks from my house, but the bus only comes by once every two hours between 9am-5pm. There's also a very stupid hub design to the routes, so if you live in City B, you need to take a bus 15 miles to the hub in City A, so you can transfer to the bus for City C, even though B and C are less than 5 miles apart.
In truth it's probably a bit of both, there likely aren't enough buses/routes and there are not enough buses on each route. Typically in most US cities, even State capitals, buses just don't have enough usage to justify doubling or tripling them to either create more routes or reduce frequency. In some cities they do have super limited routes that may be meandering, but have less stops, or are short in length to maximize frequency, but generally this is for a very specific route.
I used to live in a large US city in the south east that had a bus route that ran from a designated parking lot to a major industrial area. A one way trip for the bus was around 40 minutes (they had isolated bus only lanes with enforcement) and if you were to drive in traffic it would take 35 min to an hour. On the other hand my bus commute in that city would have been at least 2 hours to and from my workplace because it wasn't that specific route.
Similar situation when I was in college, the main campus was only like 2 miles long. My furthest class was about a mile away, but between waiting for the bus to arrive and then also waiting for it to drive across campus it was generally faster to just walk. After maybe the first week I never rode the bus again.
Smaller buses. Some cities just use vans for smaller routes.
Sure, I've seen that, so you got me thinking on it. The largest city near me has 1 way adult bus fare at $2.20 one way and express bus fare at $3.00. The city's internal minimum wage is $25/hour. To add an extra vehicle you would need a minimum of 8.3 passengers per hour of service to recoup costs of just the driver's wages. This doesn't include vehicle maintenance or all the other costs of employment (contributions to his 401k, contributions to the pension fund, the employer match for personal insurance, workplace insurance, etc).
Realistically you probably need greater than 12 passengers per hour per extra vehicle you add and that's on speculative hope that if you reach a certain coverage threshold people will use it rather than drive their own car. It explains itself why it's a hard sell to politicians.
Your public transit has to pay for itself? Are your roads and sidewalks self-funding too?
I think that generally depends on the city, but most cities will have what are known as Enterprise funds. This generally applies to things like the Utility Departments (water, power, and some cities even run an internet service provider) where rather than running on taxes these programs need to function almost entirely from funds they bring in for charging for their services. Things like road and sidewalk maintenance wouldn't fall into Enterprise fund operation since there is no active service being rendered that can be charged for, though you could have toll roads but they are exceptionally unpopular in the US.
A bus or rail system could be an Enterprise fund, but it probably depends on where you're at. The public transit system in NYC is an enterprise fund because they have enough usage that they can raise funds from services to cover their costs, but a bus system in a rural city might not be an enterprise fund if it's being used almost solely to provide the elderly or poor with transportation.
In addition to Enterprise funds, US cities operate as businesses (ie they must have balanced budgets and operate within their means, they don't get to act like the federal government and just close down). In most cases if you said we're going to triple the buses/vans but now instead of being revenue neutral it's going to lose money it won't get approved.
9 hours? Jeez.
Though, for 2.8 miles I wouldn't even consider a bus. I'll grab my bicycle and be there in 12 minutes.
You'd probably die twice there
Get there and die twice? That's a bit extreme
I have literally walked maybe twice that distance crossing the city central area of London at 4 AM (at time when there's no Tube and just a handful of night buses once every half an hour or so and only for a few bus lines) coming from a night out and it took me a bit over 1h and I was drunk.
Mind you, in cities in Europe you actually have proper sidewalks, even in suburban areas, so maybe the previous poster had not such conditions to just do it by walking. Also it was only the way back - the way in was done far earlier in the day when all public transportation was active.
Anyways, the point being that even 2.8 miles is easilly a walkable distance, even drunk, as long as you have and hour or so to spare.
True, totally doable and several people did so. There was even a bike rack installed on the premises.
I went to a college that was 2.5 hours away by car and 6 hours by bus. And that six hours didn't count the half hour it took to get a ride to the bus stop from my college. At least the bus let off in my hometown so my folks didn't have to go far to pick me up.
My friend, I think you need to learn how to properly read a bus schedule.
I wasnt reading. It was a form on a website where I put in starting location, ending location and expected arrival time. It said what time I should go to bus stop and how long the trip would take.